This Street, That Man, This Life
by Stellaluna
Summary: Mac in the early morning, the inescapable city.


**Spoilers:** Nothing specific, but this is probably set sometime before "Tanglewood."**  
Rating:** PG-13 for language**  
Disclaimer:** None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.**  
Archive:** Please ask.**  
Notes:** Influenced by the Cowboy Junkies and Johnny Cash. The concept of fleetingly improvised men comes from the writings of Daniel Paul Schreber.

_I. This Street_

Very early morning, just past dawn under a gray, drizzling sky, and the streets are shrouded in silence and secrets. He chooses to let his walk from the subway to the lab take him down side streets, preferring to avoid the main thoroughfare of Broadway. Lafayette Street, just one block over, is unpopulated and dazed in the gloom, the bulk of Cooper Union cutting off any light that might try to sneak its way through the clouds.

A line from an old Sinatra song occurs to him, and he decides that, while the city may in fact never sleep, it does sometimes rest. This, this post-dawn limbo, a held breath in between the night and the true beginning of the day, is one of the times when New York seems closest to achieving a brief semblance of peace. A respite from the fear-soaked revelry of the night before the frenzy of the day truly kicks into gear.

He pauses near the corner of 5th Street, and looks down the block at the apartment houses. Silent here too, no different than anywhere else he's walked this morning, but he knows that behind every door there's a secret, and a lie: a betrayed husband, a neglected child, a left wife. Here and there, deeper things, too, and darker; there are secrets worse than the petty everyday domestic troubles. Some houses are haunted; some doors are portals to a hell even Dante never dreamed of.

New York is a jail; New York is Alcatraz, a prison island in the middle of the river.

This street is a minefield, crisscrossed with invisible tripwires.

_II. That Man_

It's bad, this ascribing of sentience to brick and concrete: H.P. Lovecraft in Manhattan. It's the people, not the city, people who murder and rape and hurt. But have the people corrupted the city, or has living here corrupted them, all eight million inhabitants? He doesn't know, any more than he knows why he stays.

He does know that he needs coffee, something to chase away these early-morning flights of fancy. He stands in his office for a minute, overcoat in hand, looking out over the lab, then goes off to the kitchen to start the coffeepot.

He'd had a bad night, of course; it was always a bad night that brought on this kind of morbid metaphor-hunting. Not that he has very many good nights, but some are worse than others. He hasn't slept more than an hour or two at a time in more than a week, and what little rest he's been able to manage has been thin and broken, and filled with fragmented phantoms. He's at the stage of insomnia where he views the waking world through a scrim, where dizziness wreaks havoc with his balance and he has to concentrate on every step to not go stumbling like a drunk.

This is the point at which Stella usually begins to eye him with suspicion, and accuse him of not even trying to sleep. He protests, argues if he has the energy; tries, in general, to put her off. It never works. Even if she stops talking about it, it's inevitable that he'll go back to his office at some point and find a box of Sleepy-Time Tea on his chair or in a drawer, or a bottle of St. John's Wort.

These broad hints, which he knows she offers for her own amusement as much as anything else, come off as only slightly more subtle than when she sits down next to him and demands, out of the blue, "So are you going to take a nap, or do I just have to get a mallet and knock you over the head?" Which was what she'd said to him last night, then rolled her eyes and accused him of having no sense of humor when he'd pointed out, in a mild tone, that assaulting an officer was a felony.

He thinks of Stella often during his nightly walks in Brooklyn, and on his way to work in the morning: any time, really, when the streets draw close around him and the city's secrets trouble his imagination. Her and Danny both; they're the two people in for whom he fears the most every time he starts reviewing all the things that the city can do to a person, the way New York can strip you bare and leave you bleeding, hanging from a rusted nail when you least expect it.

It's not that they can't take care of themselves. It's that he knows you can do everything right, and still end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Appointments in Samara must be kept and, once arranged, there's nothing either he or anyone else can do to change that. It's not even his job; his job is to take stock of the aftermath and figure out what happened. Doctors save lives; priests sanctify them; all he does is explain how they end.

This begs the question (he thinks, standing in the little kitchen and watching the coffeepot fill, unaware that he's beginning to sway in his exhaustion) of why it's Stella and Danny who worry him so, and not Aiden, or Flack, or even Hawkes. Hawkes doesn't go out in the field, but he's no safer than the rest of them. All of them are in the same danger all the time, but Danny is his protege (or the closest thing he has to one; so much potential there, and so much troubling admiration in the man's eyes), and Stella is...Stella. She's been with him for so long now, and he knows her the best.

When he thinks about these things, as he does rarely, yet more often than he would like, words like _love_ and _need_ never cross his mind.

He's a dangerous man: because he's aware of the city's secrets, and because he exposes them. He knows how to finish the stories that are begun when a gun is fired, or a knife is shoved between the slats of a ribcage; he can use a microscopic stain on a stocking to find the rapist scum that grabbed a woman on East 74th Street, or a fleck of paint beneath a fingernail to find the shooter in a Lower East Side drive-by. He _knows_. At that stage, the causes of assault and death are scientific.

What's never scientific are the human motivations behind such acts; and some deaths remain forever inexplicable, something that not all the DNA evidence in the world can change. It all comes back to wrong place, wrong time, and to appointments in Samara. He tries not to think of Claire (he always tries not to think of Claire), but she is, after all, the example nearest to hand.

He's still a Catholic; he always will be a Catholic, and would be even if he were to convert tomorrow to Judaism, or join the Unitarian church. His Catholicism is no more a matter of choice than his blood type, or the color of his eyes. Faith is a different matter altogether, separate from religion no matter what the priests say during their sermons. He didn't worry much about faith for many years, not in the face of his other concerns: training in the Corps, and studying for his Master's, and later joining the NYPD. Combine those goals with a host of other mundane worries, and faith was at the bottom of the list of things that needed his focus.

Now it's different; now he struggles to have faith. He has to believe that Claire is someplace better, and faith is necessary for maintaining that belief. His times of prayer are rare, his visits to church still rarer; but when he does pray, he asks that she be kept warm and safe, and far away from any further harm. The alternative to this is to think that she was only her body, a sum total of flesh and bone no different than any of the other corpses that cross his evidence table year after year. This is unacceptable.

(And there never was a body, never one that he saw; never one that anyone was able to find. He was spared the morgue, spared _yes, that's my wife_, but the bitter irony of the situation hasn't escaped him.)

He keeps faith, then, in the existence of the human soul, and that somewhere on the other side of mortality, there's a safe harbor.

In his more selfish moments, he prays for himself instead, that his memory be purged of this place. He would forget all of it, if he could, New York, and Claire and his co-workers, who are human and fragile; and he hates them for it even as he worries.

The coffee's finally finished brewing, and he pours himself a cup, black. It'll give him the shakes, but will also let him keep his eyes open a little while longer without fear that he'll find himself dozing off over a case file. His head is already swimming, a far-off pinpoint of pain beginning to settle itself behind his left eye.

The walk back to his office is a chance for him to enjoy the quiet of the empty lab. He's got an hour or two yet before the rest of the staff will start wandering in, an hour or two of solitude, during which he can exist as the man he knows himself to be, rather than the fleetingly improvised man others imagine when they look at him.

He was a soldier for a long time; he _is_ still a soldier. Like his Catholicism, the Marine Corps is bred into his bones. Now he's a detective. These things have made up the bulk of his adult life. For a briefer time, he was a husband, and sometimes a lover or a friend. In retrospect, these things seem like mistakes, as if they had been meant for some other person, or some other life. They were meant for a man who wasn't him, a man who was capable of turning a blind eye to fate, to conclusions that were both pitiless and inevitable. A man more vulnerable to the world's caprices than he is, or ever will be; who can look at an offer of love or devotion and see an upturned hand instead of a closed fist.

He doesn't think he was ever meant to be that man.

_III. This Life_

He has wished sometimes, in an abstract fashion, that he could start over again, in another place and another life. Other cities have their own characters - Berlin is all history and sorrow, bowed under the weight of its regret; New Orleans is conjure magic and drunk fucking in cemeteries, in thrall to its myths - and he thinks that none of them would be quite like New York. He could leave this asylum behind, and look for something new, somewhere better and more sane.

This is, of course, impractical; even if he didn't know better, and realize that no place in the world can offer sanctuary, and that he'd be the same person no matter where he ended up, it would still be impractical. The simple realities of what such a thing would entail - moving, packing, finding a new job - exhaust him even in theory. His work here, his career, isn't something he wants to abandon.

Every city has its own secrets; every person walks around with secrets held close to his or her chest. Men and women know how to keep from showing their cards, at least until all the hands start coming up aces and eights. That's where he comes in, and exposes what was beneath the facade all along. Maybe it doesn't matter that, here, the secrets run so deep and so ugly; at least he knows what he's dealing with.

Life itself carries secrets, too, like the call of the sea trapped within a seashell. The crash of the ocean caught within a series of delicate chambers, a constant rush and swirl when held to the ear: it's not always audible, but it's always there. And he thinks that, no matter how close you hold a person, they can still leave you. They can still hide things that you would never dream of to look at them, not in a million years.

He stands at his office window, coffee in hand and the steam swirling around his face, and looks down at the warren of desks and labs, the closest he can get to the one place in all the world where he's able to make the pieces fit together.

Memory is never soft and faded, but harsh and sharp, razor-edged; his mind bleeds rust.

Here on this street: that man, in this life.


End file.
